Pirate's Cove

This is the budget that Democrats are having conniptions fits over, because it mostly requests big, big cuts. One thing they do not understand, as most of them have spent seemingly their whole lives in the un-reality of elected politics, is that the budget request is a starting point of a negotiation, much like when someone goes into a car dealer and trots out a massive lowball number while the dealer goes with sticker. There’s a compromise point there. And when it comes to illegal immigration, we get

(Mother Jones) While he’s still waiting for Mexico to agree to pay for his “big, beautiful” border wall, President Donald Trump is asking for $1.6 billion for, as Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney put it, the barrier’s “bricks and mortar.” An unnamed source told CNN that the money requested in the newly released 2018 budget proposal would cover just a few dozen miles of wall.

The proposed wall spending represents a significant portion of the more than $4.5 billion the White House is requesting for immigration enforcement and a border protection package whose wish list ranges from communications equipment and surveillance technology to aircraft and weapons. It also includes $1.5 billion to expand its efforts to detain and deport undocumented immigrants, as well as $300 million to recruit, hire, and train 1,500 new immigration agents, a step toward Trump’s call to add 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and 5,000 Customs and Border Protection agents. (According to CBP estimates, it would likely take as long as a decade to pull off hiring as many people as Trump wants, and it would have to ease the hiring standards to do so.)

Under Trump’s budget, the Department of Justice would get $7.2 million to hire 70 new prosecutors “to support an increase in immigration law enforcement” and focus on serious crimes committed by immigrants, as well as immigration-related offenses such as reentry after deportation. To help clear the years-long backlog in the immigration courts—there are currently 542,000 pending cases before 301 judges—the DOJ would also receive $75 million to hire 75 new immigration judges and support staff.

This is the type of information that sends supporters of people who are unlawfully present into apoplexy, bur, for the rest of us who are tired of illegal aliens

The budget, as we see at Politico, also goes after sanctuary cities, by requesting that Homeland Security funding is denied to those cities that ignore detainers.

One thing he’s missing in the budget request is on illegal overstayes

(Washington Times) The nexus of illegal immigration into the U.S. has shifted away from the southwest border and into the country’s air and sea ports, where more than 54 million visitors checked in last year — and nearly 630,000 of them didn’t go home, according to new numbers released Monday.

Known as visa overstays, the visitors present a different challenge than the border crossers, and one that Homeland Security officials are still trying to figure out how to handle.

Quite a few of these were overstays by students, and most were long term overstays. It might be worthwhile for immigration enforcement to initiate a crackdown, putting those illegals on notice.